Deciding to purchase a new hard drive comes with a range of choices based around performance and power. Do you want a 5400 or 7200rpm drive, 16, 32, or 64MB cache, 3Gb/s or 6Gb/s interface, and what amount of storage is available with your chosen configuration? In the past Seagate has catered for every scenario through its Barracuda, Barracuda Green, and Barracuda XT product lines, but that all changes today.

Seagate has decided to streamline the Barracuda product range into a single line of drives carrying the name. Barracuda Green is being discontinued, and the Barracuda XT will become a hybrid drive offering. Therefore, if you want a typical desktop PC hard drive from Seagate it will only carry the name Barracuda.

The reason for deciding to do this is a simple one: hard drive manufacturing has got to the point now where all hard drives Seagate offers are as efficient as its Green range was. The company also moved to a 1TB per platter design, which along with other improvement means all its drives can now offer good performance. By streamlining the range it also simplifies production for Seagate, and makes things clearer for both OEMs and consumers alike. Basically, if you decide to buy a Barracuda, the only decision you have to make is how much storage you want.

Now, when you go shopping for a Seagate hard drive you will be offered the Barracuda in storage capacities of 250GB right up to 3TB. All the drives will spin at 7,200rpm, they will all use a 6Gb/s interface, and any drive over 500GB in size will have a 64MB cache (the smaller drives will use 16MB). All the drives will include OptiCache for performance, AcuTrac for reliability, and SmartAlign for moving to 4ksectors. If you want to use a 3TB drive with an older machine, there’s also DiscWizard software included to make it work.

The Barracuda Green drives will continue to be available until February next year, where as the XT is currently being re-branded as a hybrid SSD with no confirmed re-release date. As for the all new Barracuda drives, they should start appearing on Amazon, CDW, Newegg, and TigerDirect first.